Protocol Security Researcher
Aave Labs ·
- Employment
- Contract
- Category
- Security
- Experience
- 5+ years
You will review protocol changes and analyze smart contracts, mechanisms, and integrations from an attacker perspective. You will identify dependency risks, contribute to AI-assisted security tooling, document reusable findings, support monitoring and incident response needs, and help external auditors define review scope.
Responsibilities
- Review major protocol changes before external audit or deployment
- Perform attacker-driven analysis of smart contracts, protocol mechanisms, and integrations
- Participate in security-relevant design and architecture discussions
- Identify risks in assets, bridges, oracles, adapters, and critical dependencies
- Contribute to AI-assisted security tooling and evaluate it in review workflows
- Turn findings into reusable knowledge, invariants, assumptions, and testing or monitoring ideas
- Work with monitoring and incident response teams on operational needs
- Collaborate with external auditors on scope, known risks, and areas of concern
Requirements
- 5+ years of relevant security experience
- Smart contract security background
- Ability to independently review complex codebases and reason about protocol-level failure modes
- Attacker mindset
- Understanding of DeFi mechanisms, including lending, liquidations, accounting, oracles, collateral, governance, and integrations
- Experience using AI to improve security research or review
- Written communication skills for explaining risk, impact, uncertainty, and trade-offs
- Judgement regarding severity and exploitability